[webkit-dev] It's time to remove the Haiku port

[Ryan Leavengood]

Hello all,

Sorry for the delay in response to this, I don't follow this mailing
list closely, obviously. I just happened to search for Haiku, and was
not too shocked to see this message. Given that the Haiku port has now
been removed (in fact, Adam did it right on September 25 when this
message was sent), clearly I'm way too late.

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 3:34 AM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:
>
> In the past year, http://trac.webkit.org/log/trunk/Source/WebKit/haiku
> and http://trac.webkit.org/log/trunk/Source/WebCore/platform/haiku
> have been modified 70 times by non-Haiku contributors and zero times
> by Haiku contributors.

I am so sorry that this has happened! I was the original porter for
the Haiku WebKit port and have continued to work on it recently.
Unfortunately the Haiku community is a small group of people and most
of the developers spend their time working on Haiku itself. We really
appreciate the efforts to keep the Haiku port updated as things have
changed in WebKit.

The primary problem with our port right now is some of the developers
made the choice (which I objected to) to make our own Subversion repo
containing the WebKit code to make it easier (in their eyes) to
develop the port. Once Stephan no longer was working on it, this clone
became very out of date. Making things worse was the great code
re-organizing which occurred a while ago here at WebKit (the move to
Source, etc.)

> As part of our effort to reduce complexity in WebKit, I believe it is
> now time to remove the Haiku port.

So as I mentioned this has already been done. Haiku itself is far from
dead. We aren't a huge project but we have many active developers and
multiple commits a day. We also still plan to make use of WebKit.

I guess we are at a crossroads. I would much prefer not to have to
maintain our own custom repo of WebKit. But it seems we have become
more of a burden than a help on WebKit, but I suppose that is the case
for most ports outside of the popular platforms.

Where can we go from here? What does the WebKit project need to see
from the Haiku maintainers to have us be a supported port again?

Again I'm sorry for the lack of activity over the years but as you can
imagine it is hard to work on an entire platform port for WebKit in
one's spare time. We had to hire Stephan as a contractor to get all
the work we got from him, and probably from your perspective that was
nothing.

-- 
Regards,
Ryan